This theory of change was drafted in response to a series of meetings with community artists and activists that I facilitated in New Orleans on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
- Dudley Cocke

Theory of Change

Effective grassroots organizing around issues of social justice invariably begins small; the basic unit of such organizing is the individual discovering through experience his or her own truth of the issue, then testing and developing that truth in dialog with others who also have direct knowledge. Multiply this learning and society can change: a national movement for reform can develop from the aggregation of such experience and knowledge.

Such a movement can only be sustained when this grassroots process of individual and collective learning continues to inspire and shape awareness and action. Conversely, when people and their organizations lose touch with such knowledge as the shaping force of reform, the movement will begin to collapse. This theory of change holds that those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the solution. Sometimes tarred as political correctness or social engineering, grassroots organizing is in fact an antidote to both.

This bottom-up theory of change provides a critique of the genre of the performing arts which defines itself as “progressive.” It shows much of this progressive work to be a hybrid of top-down and bottom-up – that is, performance that has been conceived by one or a few and then dressed in grassroots garb to pass for bottom-up.

Here’s how it often plays out. An artist with a formidable liberal – progressive reputation has an exciting idea for a performance that addresses some aspect of social justice. Funders are attracted to the artist and his or her “cutting-edge” conception. A grant is made, and the artist begins working with the community to realize the performance. The problem, from the perspective of our theory of change, is that the artist’s conception is not tested and reconceived by people in the community based on their individual and group experience with the issue. The project is launched some distance off the ground and eventually floats away without affecting the problem it seeks to address. It fails because those with the problem are not the generative base for devising and enacting the solution.